How a tape of a police beating went viral years before anybody used the internet

Video tape shot by George
Holliday earlier this month from his apartment in a suburb of Los
Angeles shows what appears to be a group of police officers
beating a man with nightsticks and kicking him as other officers
look on, March 3, 1991.AP
Photo/George Holliday/Courtesy of KTLA Los
Angeles

That wasn't the case the year of the Rodney King beating. I'm old
enough to remember the Rodney King trial and the riots
that followed in 1992, and it was an era long before
everything was recorded let alone put online. Still, the video of
King's beating managed to become as "viral" as a pre-internet
recording could have been.

Here's how it happened. A man named George Holliday woke up to
the sound of sirens a little after midnight in March 1991.
Holliday grabbed
his Sony Handycam and recorded the beating that would become
a part of America's collective memory. All told, King was struck
as many as 56 times,
The New York Times reported in 1991. The four officers, the
Times reported, had no idea they were being recorded.

The tape also led to the indictment of the four officers
involved,
though they were eventually acquitted. Still, the tape came
to "symbolize complaints about police brutality, racism and
street violence," according to The Times.